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Microtonality: my part in its downfall Bob Gilmore key-note lecture at UK Microfest 1 October 15, 2005 Introduction The title of this talk is, of course, slightly ironic. I don’t advocate the “downfall” of microtonal scales or pitch materials, and if I did I clearly wouldn’t be here this afternoon. On the contrary, I believe such materials are here to stay, and indeed that their use will become even more widespread in creative music-making in the twenty-first century. Rather, in this talk I would like to question the shelf-life of the term “microtonality” itself as a descriptive adjective, and of related terms (“microtone”, “microtonal”, “microtonalist”), with their unfortunate connotations of “otherness” and “strangeness” and the general sense they give of microtonality as an outsider activity. Is the designation “microtonality” still useful today? Will it remain so, say, twenty-five years from now? As a musicologist I approach this topic from a somewhat different angle than most of my fellow participants in UK Microfest 1, who are primarily composers, performers and theorists. As a way of answering the questions in the above paragraph, I would like to consider the (purely speculative) idea of a History of Microtonality. Could one write such a book? There are, of course, already a couple of existing works that come close – Gardner Read’s book on microtonal notation, or Franck Jedrzejewski’s Dictionnaire des musiques microtonales – but that’s not quite the sort of thing I have in mind. Could we, for example, read twentieth-century music history as a progressive history of microtonality? Does the idea make sense? Does it stand up to investigation? What sort of a history would this be? Clearly one can write a history of anything – recent histories I’ve read include one of the pencil, and one of the Devil – but would a history of microtonality make an interesting (or a coherent) story? A semantic preamble Before we begin, however, I’d like to offer a brief semantic preamble and look at this word “microtonality” itself. It’s a term that’s always bothered me. I’ve rarely used the word in my own voice, so to speak, in my published articles, though I’ve quoted other people’s use of it. Part of the problem is that a clear definition of the word “microtonality” is frustratingly hard to pin down. I take it to mean the conscious, deliberate use of “new” or unfamiliar pitch materials outside the conventional twelve pitch classes. Others would contest this. (To me, describing a traditional fiddler bending a pitch as an instance of microtonality is, if not exactly wrong, pretty meaningless.) Or let’s take the word “microtone”. This word is obviously silly. I mean, how can a note in isolation be a microtone? It doesn’t make sense. (Not to mention the inferiority complex one would develop if one found oneself to be a microtone, forever subordinate to those twelve ruling “non-microtones”.) The French equivalent, “les micro-intervalles”, is at least not silly because it implies that a note is a microtone only in relation to something else. But we have no real translation for “les micro-intervalles” in English. Likewise, I’ve always thought it an odd usage when someone is described (or describes themselves) as a “microtonal composer”. Let me suggest a parallel case. Microtones are to the pitch domain roughly what “extended techniques” are to the timbral domain. (“Extended techniques” was a term that gained vogue in the 1960s to describe the use of fluttertonguing, multiphonics, etc, on wind instruments, or various kinds of sul ponticello or sul tasto on strings.) Nowadays “extended techniques” are an integral part of a new music player’s vocabulary, just like microtones. But you’d never think of describing Berio, say, as an “extended techniques composer”, and it seems to me it makes equally little sense to describe someone as a “microtonal composer”. The word “microtonal” itself I have fewer objections to, and it’s OK when used as a description of, say, a particular pitch texture in a given piece where the space of the octave is saturated with lots of small intervals. But I think we should be careful about using the word “microtonal” indiscriminately. (A usage such as “microtonal concerts”, for example, I also find silly: and anyway the real problem with microtonal concerts, as my friend Nye Parry says, is that there’s never enough time to get a decent drink as they always have such small intervals.) Anyway, that’s the end of my little semantic preamble. But you see problems looming even in the very words we use when we turn our attention to a History of Microtonality. With this in mind, let’s consider in turn the various stages of twentieth-century usage of new pitch materials. Microtonality: a rough guide The hypothesis has been advanced, by Ben Johnston, that there is a “proto-microtonal” phase in twentieth-century music (and indeed late nineteenth-century music), when the pitch usages of composers suggested a pitch “space” larger than that of twelve tones in the octave. These composers, of course, lacked the means to realise these implications. (Ben has discussed the case of Debussy; I’d add figures like Scriabin and Varèse). It’s true that Debussy’s (and Messiaen’s) use of essentially “consonant” sevenths, ninths and elevenths in their harmony does parallel the structure of the overtone series (as, some decades later, do the Otonalities in the music of Harry Partch). But Debussy’s music makes such extensive use of enharmonic ambiguity, even with regard to the “meaning” of a single pitch, that the loss of ambiguity that would result from retuning his music in just intonation would undermine a great many of his most characteristic harmonic manoeuvres. So in the case of Debussy there remains some doubt how proto-microtonal his music really is, no matter how suggestive those “harmonic” sevenths and ninths are. The case of Varèse seems to me a less problematic one. I’ve no doubt that Varèse would gladly have written microtonal intervals in his instrumental music had players of his heyday (the 1920s) been able to realise them. Varèse was devoted to overcoming the sonic limitations of the tempered system; in fact you could say that he finally got there in later works like Déserts. So I would certainly give him a prominent place in any proto-history of Microtonality. In a history of Microtonality proper, Schoenberg would get an honourable passing mention because of his serious discussion of 53-note equal temperament in a footnote to his Harmonielehre of 1911. Bartók would make a fleeting appearance thanks to the use of quartertones in his solo violin sonata, even though there is another version without quartertones; and Ives would get a more extended discussion because of his Three Quarter-tone Impressions for two pianos tuned a quartertone apart. (This piece of Ives, usually dated around 1924, is the first genuinely microtonal work by any major composer.) Webern discussed the expansion of our pitch resources in his lectures The Path to the New Music given in Vienna in the early 1930s, though his actual music seems the epitome of twelve-note equal temperament, about as un- microtonal as you can possibly imagine. Poor old Stravinsky, on the other hand, would hardly get a look-in. The real pioneers of microtonal music are still fairly obscure figures, at least as far as performances and recordings are concerned. The main ones, I’d suggest, are the Mexican Julián Carrillo (1875-1965); the Russian Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979); the Czech Alois Hába (1893-1973); and the American Harry Partch (1901-1974). Even here there are considerable differences between these four figures. Carrillo, Wyschnegradsky and Hába all used divisions of the tempered tone (third-, quarter-, fifth-, sixth-, eighth-, sixteenth-tones etc) and were motivated by the wish to expand, not overthrow, the existing resources. They all built new instruments (or commissioned other people to build them) to realise these new scales. In general their work was quite well-known and much discussed in their lifetimes; Carrillo and Hába, in particular, received a good deal of acclaim. They were seen as radical artists, prophets not without honour in their own countries. Wyschnegradsky was, and remains, somewhat less well known. Partch’s use of microtonal intervals, however (which for him was only one aspect of his work, and not the most important aspect) was part of an overall anti-institutional stance, in which the whole of western music – its concert occasions, musical forms, instruments, and tuning system – was called into question. He did not really consider himself to be a “microtonalist” and would probably have had little interest, at least later in his life, in events such as this Microfest. His interest in tuning was part of a web of ideas, all of which are interlinked. He wanted to put music back in touch with ancient values he believed it was disregarding, such as an integrated relationship with the other arts. His aim was not to augment but to overthrow the existing system of equal temperament, and replace it with a complex system of just intonation. American musical life, in consequence, largely sidelined him for most of his active lifetime. So, from the point of view of our “History”, the idea of these four figures forming a group is essentially untenable, for both geographical and ideological reasons. There is a further reason, a stylistic one: even the most casual acquaintance with the music of each of the four will show that their musical languages do not resemble each other, not even superficially.

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